Dynamic Yield calls itself an AI-powered Experience Optimization platform that promises to deliver individualized experiences at every customer touchpoint: web, apps, email, kiosks, IoT, and call centers. The platform’s data management capabilities provide for a unified view of the customer, allowing the rapid and scalable creation of highly targeted digital interactions. Marketers, product managers, and engineers use Dynamic Yield for: Launching new personalization…
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Google Tag Manager
Score 8.8 out of 10
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From Google, the Google Tag Manager is a tag management application that facilitates creating, embedding, and updating tags across websites and mobile apps, thus gaining the benefits of data standardization and speed of deployment. Google touts an agency friendly system with multiple user access, and tools to improve tags performance like debugging, and rules, macros or automated tag firing. The Google Tag Manager also integrates with Google product DoubleClick. Moreover, Google Tag Manager is…
We’re running on a Single Page Application, so we were looking to partner with a technology vendor who can seamlessly integrate with SPA environments and allow us to dynamically modify, test, and personalize various elements on our app screens. Prior to Dynamic Yield, we were working with Optimizely and encountered huge challenges integrating with our SPA infrastructure.
Google Tag Manager is well suited when the marketer or marketing team does not work closely with the developers. In this scenario, it means that the marketer can deploy 3rd party tools such as live chat widgets, advertising pixels, and much more themselves in a timely manner. Google Tag Manager may be less relevant in an organization where the marketer is also the developer or has a strong development background, where they can implement the 3rd party tags directly on the site when they need. But even in this instance, there's still great benefit in using Google Tag Manager.
Provide fantastic support, both in relation to strategy/best practice and troubleshooting.
An easy to use interface, as a user who is relatively new to Dynamic Yield I find that it is an intuitive platform to use.
The ability to segment and drill down on data allows for really specific insights which, whilst not necessarily being leveraged on a testing basis, can be super valuable from a greater marketing perspective.
Selecting elements on a site [object, class, cookie, etc] (to later fire an event, send some data, etc) is very easy with triggers. Want to add an event when someone clicks on a button? Super easy. It was many many DOM selectors and you can even add custom functions if you need to do something more specific
In general, firing events in different circumstances is very easy mixing triggers and tags. You can track almost any element of the DOM and do whatever you want with it.
Testing is a great functionality. Only you can see what's on the site and you can debug it easily by seeing which events or tags were triggered and all the DOM elements involved (and why they matched the trigger).
Working in environments (staging, production) and versioning is easy to do, deploying changes in 2 clicks.
Greater flexibility for the out of the box templates - things such as typeface are not consistent and can require developer time to ensure a seamless site experience
Exporting datasets don't necessarily reflect the way Dyanmic Yield is implemented on site, occasionally requiring that you go through experience by experience to extract the data you want
I would like to see a more customizable homepage dashboard with the ability to modify the content of widgets, showing trends across multiple experiences rather than just being able to update the timeframe for a widget between Yesterday, Past 7 Days, or Past 30 Days before having to deep dive into a full report
There are several good integrations, but there can always be more. Native tracking for call tracking solutions, analytics providers, non-Google advertisers would be top of my list.
Documentation is just dreadful. Luckily there are some awesome folks out there doing crowdsourced tutorials (shout out to Simo Ahava) but by and large the Google Tag Manager instructions are worth what you pay for them.
implementation took a long time but also, DY has really proven that they are transforming and adapting their platform to be more user friendly and the right technology choice for their brand or company
Google Tag Manager makes tracking traffic to our websites effortless, which enables our developers to focus on other tasks. Setting up a new instance takes only minutes and additional scripts can be added/modified without touching the source code of a site in production. This enables our marketing directors to coordinate tests and experiments with minimal effort.
Overall, the interface is not difficult to understand. Although to create campaigns or define strategies for recommendations, some study is required.
Also, some reports are hidden, you really need to know where to look in order to see them (e.g. strategies performance or email campaigns performance).
Also, there is a lack of context help that would improve a lot the usability, especially when you face a feature or a report for the first time.
Google Tag Manager is the definition of a learning curve. At the beginning, you can barely do the minimum and it can seem questionable as to why you would use it. However, as users begin to learn its offerings and see how it can do much more, they will have a moment where GTM becomes a tool that empowers their ability to track and efficiently collect data for important business questions.
Allison Schwartz, Customer Success Manager at Dynamic Yield has been nothing less than amazing and stellar! She really sets the standard for customer success and support. Their technical support is fast and reliable, and their educational resources are top of the line
Planning and communication will help greatly with an in-house implementation. If there are large teams, try to limit the number of people involved to 1-2 developers (back-end dev may be necessary depending on your platform), one analytics marketer and one project manager.
Oracle Maxymiser is very clunky and hard to code with. Previewing changes was a challenge and development for fixes were slow
Optimizely - Great for coding. Fast and efficient. Everything worked great. They were limited at personalization triggers though and their costs were expensive.
Monetate - Evaluated but their UI was hard to use.
We moved to GTM from a standard Google Analytics implementation. GTM is much more flexible and easier to make changes, especially as the changes relate to multiple sites and environments. While there is a learning curve when figuring out how to use GTM, I believe the change has been worth it because it helps us understand at a more fundamental level how our tracking works and gives us a lot more control over what we track and how.
Most tests have had a positive impact on either revenue or conversion rate - quite often in double digits.
Dynamic Yield has also helped us to stop some particular initiatives through direct interaction with the customer base via questionnaires or by a test proving negative quicker than rolling out a permanent feature.
GTM is very useful to determine if a particular element on the site is useful (i.e. is it being watched, is it being clicked, does it help customers navigate through more pages). As an SEO person, I can use this information to decide what to optimize for but also to track progress and see improvements in engagement.
With the use of Google Tag Manager, I was able to easily inject an A/B testing tool which lead to several improvements in lead generation.
